Farley Mowat obituary

The Canadian writer and feisty environmental advocate Farley Mowat has died aged 92. The prolific, bestselling author of more than 40 books was a passionate defender of the northern wilderness regions, which he characterised well, describing their blustery landscapes, fierce weather and strange beauty. He often wrote about isolated native populations, such as the Caribou Inuits, or about animal life, especially threatened species.

Perhaps his most famous book was Never Cry Wolf (1963), a controversial first-person (though fictionalised) account of the author's experiences observing the habits and habitat of the Arctic wolf. Mowat wrote: "We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be – the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer."

Son of Angus and Helen Mowat, he was born in Belleville, Ontario. His father was a librarian who had fought at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in France in the first world war. During the depression, the family moved to Saskatoon, in Saskatchewan, where Mowat developed a love for the countryside. He kept any number of pets, including a rattlesnake, a gopher and a Florida alligator. His love of wild creatures persisted to the end, and features in many of his books. With his great-uncle, he made his first visit to the Arctic at the age of 15.

A commissioned officer in the Canadian army during the second world war, Mowat belonged to the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, the subject of his second book, The Regiment (1955). He spent much of 1943 and 1944 in Italy, rising to the rank of captain. Early in 1945 he moved to an intelligence unit in the Netherlands, where he crossed enemy lines to begin negotiations about a food drop that is credited with having saved thousands of Dutch lives.

After the war, as a student at the University of Toronto, he first visited the Caribou Inuit tribes, which fascinated him. Their mistreatment outraged him, and he wrote People of the Deer (1952), his first novel, centred on the threat to this native population posed by government neglect and, worse, the destruction of herds by outside hunters – a byproduct of the colonial system that Mowat opposed.

A steady stream of fiction, non-fiction and memoirs followed, including popular books for children, such as The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (1957) and Owls in the Family (1961). A memorable story of his, Walk Well, My Brother, was made into a film, The Snow Walker (2003) – the tale of a pilot who crashes his plane in a remote part of the Northwest Territories. He walks across the tundra, helped by an Inuit woman, who teaches him the techniques of survival in a harsh landscape.

For eight years, Mowat lived in Burgeo, a fishing village on the south-west coast of Newfoundland, where he wrote three memorable books set in that rugged landscape, including A Whale for the Killing (1972), a moving account of a fin whale trapped in a local cove, and how a few of his neighbours slaughtered it brutally. This evocative book concludes with an urgent plea to end the hunting of whales by commercial fishermen. It is as much an anatomy of human greed and indifference as a study of the whale as an endangered species.

Mowat often denounced the destruction of animal life, as in Sea of Slaughter (1984), a book that so upset factions within the US government at the time that he was refused entry to the country for a book tour in 1985. He recounted his problems with the US immigration authorities in a wickedly ironic book, My Discovery of America (1985), in which he stated that he would only consent to visit the US again if Ronald Reagan flew to his house in Air Force One with a personal apology.

In the late 1980s, Mowat studied the career of Dian Fossey, an American ethnologist who studied gorilla behaviour in Rwanda for 18 years and was murdered in the Virunga Mountains in 1985. Two books emerged from this period, including Woman in the Mists (1987), a candid biography of Fossey, whose spiky determination Mowat admired.

In later decades, Mowat returned to many of his favourite subjects, as when he revisited his war experiences in My Father's Son (1992). The notion of pre-Columbian visitors to America from Orkney also intrigued him, and he published The Farfarers: Before the Norse in 2000; he suggested that these ancient seafarers made vessels of hide, and that they used Iceland and Greenland as "stepping stones" over the North Atlantic. Although ethnologists and historians quietly doubted Mowat's thesis, the book found sympathetic readers. Mowat's received many honours, including the Governor General's award in 1956, and he was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1981.

He is survived by his second wife, Claire, whom he married in 1965, and two sons, Sandy and David, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.